With the growth of urban centers and metropolitan areas, public service providers and other entities often find it difficult to navigate and reach specific locations within a short or reasonable amount of time. This problem is particularly acute for law enforcement and medical professionals responding to emergencies. Traffic is often a significant factor in estimating a response time in any major city or metropolitan area. Although many modern service vehicles include navigation systems and communications equipment for reducing the transit time to a location, a need still exists for improvements in congestion awareness and reductions in response times.
Some service providers are deployed based on historical traffic and incident patterns. For example, experienced police officers accustomed to responding to calls in particular neighborhoods may prefer to travel on particular streets based on perceived efficiencies arising from their individual experiences. Additionally, a police force may schedule a particular number of police vehicles to patrol a given area at specific time periods independent of whether those vehicles are currently engaged in calls or are idle, including potentially following similar or even overlapping patrol patterns within the area.
Even if scheduling of vehicles could be improved to avoid inefficiencies due to route or region overlaps, these deployment approaches would still be inherently inefficient because they do not account for dynamic or real-time changes in traffic or incident patterns. Current deployment approaches are also inefficient because they do not account for vehicle accessibility changes within an area due to factors such as road construction or traffic accidents. Therefore, a need exists for improved service provider deployment efficiency.